3 ms·
Reminds me of the key line from Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" book. "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much." The key bit being "eat food"--real food fro
by DLA 5y ago
Reminds me of the key line from Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food" book. "Eat food. Mostly Plants. Not too much." The key bit being "eat food"--real food from nature not food products invented in a lab or made in a factory. In other words does it pass the grandmother test--if you're grandmother would not recognize the food item then it's not food. While I've had Impossible and Beyond Meat and they are tasty, I always worry about the non-food aspect.
- verdverm 5y agoThis has always been my gut feeling. Nature is so complex that trying to replicate it in a laboratory will fall short. You can't simulate all of the processes and interactions that go on.
- jfengel 5y agoThink of them as a way to add variety to your diet. If you're taking the standard "Pork/Beef/Chicken for dinner every day" diet and substituting Impossible Burgers, yeah, you're more likely to run into problems. But if you have it, say, one meal a week, as your big exception to Mostly Plants, then you'll likely do pretty well. A purely vegan diet is tricky; not at all impossible, but you have to eat a wider variety of foods. Fortunately there are lots and lots of plants available, and lots of ways to cook them, but there will be days when it's just really easy to slap a burger in a pan. Your grandmother still wouldn't recognize it as food, but it's more like food than a lot of the things people eat. There's enough vagueness in our understanding of nutrition that these make a decent addition to your diet despite violating the heuristic.